The Green Integer Blog supplements our Green Integer website with essays on various cultural topics by editor/publisher Douglas Messerli, along with a listing of Green Integer titles and information on our new books. Please note that all essays and commentary are copyrighted by the author, Douglas Messerli, and may not be republished without permission.

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Wednesday, June 17, 2015

"Neighborly Monsters" (on Eric Lichtblau's The Nazis Next Door)

neighborly monsters

Eric
Lichtblau The Nazi Next Door: How
American Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt, 2014)

As
I mention at the end of my essay on Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie and Willie above, my father fought in World War II as a
bomber, proudly feeling afterwards that he had battled to save the Jews—even
if, if fact, by the time he bombed Frankfurt most of the German Jews had been
sent away to camps or forced to attempt escape into other countries. Indeed my
father remained committed to that belief throughout his life, never permitting
my German-born, uneducated farmer grandfather, my mother’s father, to speak his
anti-Semitic observations; every time we visited the basically kindly man, when
he said something about “the Jews,” my parents booth quickly stood and hurried
my brother, sister, and I off to the car for the return home. Since we visited
my grandfather, Tobe Caspers, regularly at Easter, I believe these painful
experiences made that holiday my least favorite of the year.

Despite father’s and mother’s strong-minded
commitments—of which I am proud and which, I am sure helped to make me such a
fervent spokesman against anti-Semitic sentiments and behavior—my father was basically
a naïve man, a true innocent in many respects, even though as an educator he
was seen as a community leader. Like so many others of the period, he believed
in what the government and newspapers espousing government viewpoints said without
question.

When I was in Junior High School, for
example, he strongly encouraged me write an essay on that year’s declared
topic, “Space, Man’s New Frontier,” and helped me, if I remember correctly, on
the research, making certain that the properly I expressed praise for the “great”
space architect, Dr. Werner von Braun, who, having worked on the German rockets
V-2 in World War II, had helped the U.S. create the Saturn-V. President Dwight
D. Eisenhower and Allen Dulles, then director of the Central Intelligence
Agency had, after all, been instrumental in bringing van Braun and several
other German scientists, through Operation Paperclip, to the US after the War,
and continued to award and praise these individuals for decades after for their
service to the Cold War battles with Russia.

My father never suspected, I am certain,
the truth: that Braun had had knowledge of and was likely personally involved
in activities in Mittelbau-Dora, the German base and concentration camp where
Polish, Russian, and some French slave laborers were forced to create the
rockets, while being fed little and killed on a regular basis, only to be
replaced with others. Many where hung in the tunnels of the rocket camp itself,
particularly if they were seen as slacking off or challenging their torturous
tasks.

I won that Junior High School speech
contest, and am now quite embarrassed by my own innocent praise of the former
Nazi’s contributions. As writer Eric Lichtblau makes clear in his new study, The Nazis Next Door, more than 10,000
Nazi’s—many of them brutal murderers during the War—were permitted and in many
cases even encouraged by the CIA, FBI, and other government agencies to seek
asylum after the War in the US. By the time enough people began to realize
these facts, von Braun had died; while underlings in the Huntsville, Alabama
space program such as Arthur Rudolph, who was admittedly (and implacably)
involved in the hellish concentration camp activities, and the so-called “father
of space medicine,” Dr. Hubertus
Strughold, who had medically experimented on prisoners at Dachau, were finally brought
to trial. Rudolph remained un-repentant, even trying to slip back into the US
through Canada, and Strughold died before he could be deported.

Indeed, there have now been several books
of this sad series of episodes in American history, including Richard Rashke’s
2013 book Useful Enemies and Annie
Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip. But
what Pulitzer-Prize winning author Lichtblau reveals is just how determined the
spying agencies (with figures like Dulles, Bush, and, obviously J. Edgar
Hoover) and, under President Reagan, even the office the President itself,
through opinions voiced by Pat Buchanan and others like him, were to help and
avoid any prosecution of the Nazi monsters in our midst.

By this time, whistler-blowers such as
the outspoken left-wing journalist, Chuck Allen, Congresswoman Elizabeth
Holtzman, and Howard Blum, whose work Wanted!:
The Search for Nazis in America was perhaps the most nuanced study of
former Nazis in the USA of its day, had gained enough attention to even
occasion a PBS television segment, hosted by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, on
the former CIA spy and then Passaic County chief purchasing officer, Tom
Soobzokov. Soobzokov, one of the most contentious of the ex-Nazis continued
throughout his life to insist upon his innocence, often suing and threatening
those who dared to suggest that he was a second lieutenant in the Waffen SS,
often described as “the second Eichmann,” who helped in the execution of
several hundred Russians during the War. With help from his former CIA
connections and his own supportive immigrant community, Soobzokov was found
not-guilty by a technicality: he had made
known his past to the CIA and other organizations and they had still hired him
and helped to gain citizenship. Later, Allen was arrested for and briefly
imprisoned for even writing about Soobzokov, while the Nazi he had exposed
remained free.

Soobzokov continued to live in William
Carlos Williams’ hometown of Patterson, New Jersey until a radical Nazi hunter
(perhaps related to the Jewish Defense League) exploded a bomb on his front
porch. That event, in itself, caused further calls to halt what by that time
had finally become an organized government response, headed by Eli Rosenbaum
and Tony DeVito, of the Justice Department in hunting down the remaining
Nazis.

While the organization was able to force
the deportation of people such as Rudolph, they also met with continued
resistance by other governmental agencies which refused to release records and
actually worked with the accused in staging cover-ups. The Justice Department,
however, did themselves the most harm by falsely accusing John Demjanjuk, a
retired Ohio auto worker of being the brutal Treblink guard, Ivan the Terrible.
Demjanjuk, it was later discovered was, in fact, a much lesser guard at another
camp, Sobibor, and died in a nursing home still protesting his innocence.

Several
Alabama scientists, still outraged over the trials of Rudolph and Stughold,
banded together in anger over the Justice Department division; immigrant
communities stood in firm opposition to the agency’s attacks on elderly men
whom they perceived as important community members; many of those who testified
against the ex-Nazis were growing so old that they memories were waning; and
CIA, FBI, and other offices remained strapped in the Cold War ethics, convinced
that in order to defeat the Russians, it was important to make pacts, as Dulles
had argued, even with the devil. None of these individuals, agencies, and
communities seemed to be able reflect upon the issue of their own morality in
supporting Nazis such as Soobzokov, Rudolph, Klaus Barbie, Otto von Bolschwing
(a close ally of Eichmann) or Nazi General Karl Wolff (a close associate of
Himmler), while permitting to achieve success and, quite often, financial security
in the U.S., after having helped to murder millions of Jews, Gypsies, Poles,
Russians, gays, and other peoples in Europe.

As Litchblau ponders, early in his book
how could it happen that as the Nazis fled, their victims were often “left to
languish,” that although thousands of the worst criminals in history were able
to obtain American citizenship, as many homeless and tortured Jews were barred
from our borders? The elephant in the room, quite obviously, is the fact that
many of our leaders were perfectly willing to sleep with the enemy, and were
likely as equally anti-Semitic as the Germans the Allies had just defeated. It
is so terribly painful as an American to recall, as Lichtblau does early in
this book, that Bess Truman, wife of President Truman, “did not welcome Jews in
her home, and that the President himself privately referred to Jews and “Kikes”
and “Jew Boys,” that the lionized General George S. Patton, as he and his men
were discovering in the Nazi death camps, held “Jews in utter contempt.”
Writing Truman, Old Blood and Guts,” laid bare his rabid anti-Semitism, complaining
of how the “the Jews in one DP camp, with “no sense of human relationships,” “would
defecate on the floors and live in filth like lazy ‘locusts."

We entered the synagogue (on
Yom Kippur) which was packed withthe greatest sticking mass of
humanity I have ever seen.”

As late as 1987, Pat Buchanan, Ed Meese and
other government officials were attempting to countermand another American Nazi,
Karl Linnas,’ deportation to Russia by sneaking him—without even discussing it
with the Justice Department prosecutor Neal Sher—to Panama, where Sher might imagine Linnas “relaxing under the palm trees on the beaches…living out his
days as some sort of bon vivant in exile.” The end-run deportation was thwarted
by Shear and Holtzman who, visiting the Panamanian embassy, quickly detailed
the ex-Nazi’s criminal background.

Rounding up the Nazis was clearly a near
impossible task in a country where they had been so readily welcomed.

My father, had ever read of these facts,
could never have believed them. What had his actions of War-time service meant
if they had had so little effect? Fortunately brave journalists such as
Litchblau, and Richard Rashke, Annie Jacobsen, Howard Blum, and Chuck Allen
before him continue to speak the truth so that we might finally comprehend our
complicity.

Just a few weeks before I wrote this
review (May 31, 2015), Lichtblau reported in The New York Times that “The American government paid $20.2 million
in Social Security benefits to more than 130 United States residents linked to
Nazi atrocities over the course of more than a half-century, with some of the
payments made as recently as this year….” Finally, it appears, such payments
have stopped and most of the Nazis have passed away. But we must make a pact
with one another to never forget.